She noticed something now that she hadn’t on their hurtling arrival: trees. Though much smaller than the one in which she now sat, trees dotted the seascape before her, rising equal to or above most of the masts on the ships that moved around them.
She had spent so long on the leveled surface of the Sea around Arcadia that the sight of trees growing up through the prairie Sea like this was strange and thrilling to her.
Sails could be seen in the pass now—still too far away for Kindred to get a good count but certainly more than a few, and certainly Cantrev’s ships.
The flag bearers standing atop the structure with Ebb-La-Kem and Captain Caraway had begun to move now, waving flags of different colors and shapes. Ebb-La-Kem was speaking quickly, furiously to Captain Caraway, who stared away from the battlefield, out toward the open Sea. She spoke little, but whatever it was she said must have satisfied Ebb-La-Kem, because he smiled and then turned to his flag bearers, who raised different flags, sent new messages, offered new tactics. Kindred saw sailors on ships out in the harbor raise flags in response.
The signals were passed between the Once-City fleet, and several of the ships broke away from the main mass: two of the larger dreadnoughts angled forward to block the way and take the brunt of the attack, and six smaller ships sailed farther ahead.
The ships moved slowly around trees growing up through the Sea, though Kindred couldn’t tell what they were doing. Harvesting plants to bolster their arsenals? Tying ropes between the trunks? She remembered suddenly the thorn being affixed to the front of that ship and wondered if these pirates were attaching more of them to the trees, perhaps laying a field of traps for their enemies.
“What are they doing?” Kindred asked, pointing to the smaller ships—schooners or something like it, by the look of them. They all sailed under the same flag: a blue field on which a skull was painted. Without them, the main fleet of the Once-City was severely diminished.
“Maybe they want to scout out for other enemy forces coming from either direction?” Seraph volunteered, raising his shoulders. “Those are all The Word’s ships. They have the blue ensign.”
Of course, Kindred realized, looking at the flags anew. Councillors’ ships.
“I thought there were seven on the Council,” Cora said, speaking the same thought Kindred had. “There are only four flags out there.”
Seraph nodded.
“Of course. Not all of the councillors are sailors with fleets. Only Morrow Laze, The Word, Uz, and Ebb-La-Kem have fleets. Morrow has the red flags, The Word have the blue ones, Uz and Ebb-La-Kem both have silver flags, but Ebb-La-Kem’s have a golden fist embroidered into the middle, and Uz’s have a tree.
“But there’s no way any other forces would have had time to get around the thistle reef. I don’t know what they’re doing. It’s a little late for maneuvering practice around the trees, I would think.”
Their work apparently done, the ships retreated back to where the dreadnoughts had placed themselves, angled like the tip of a spear, as if to force enemies to either side. The remainder of the fleet waited behind them.
All counted, the Once-City fleet numbered twenty-four ships, which Kindred realized was not perhaps that many on the open Sea, but here, on the Roughs, penned in by the thistle ridge on one side and the great tree on the other, a fleet of twenty-four dominated the field.
Beyond the shield of the fleet, the sails of Cantrev’s ships choked the pass, more sheets than Kindred could count, warships and scouts and supply vessels, many with metal-studded ramming prows lancing out into the sunlight.
“Cantrev brought a damn war flotilla,” Cora the Wraith said, pointing a finger out to the pass. Each of the ships, regardless of what purpose they had once served, were now outfitted for war and flying the Collective’s flag. Unity against the many mixings of the Once-City’s people and fleet.
“I guess we’re going home sooner than planned,” Little Wing said from where she stood, grinning around at them, favoring Seraph with a particularly long, nasty look. Cora smiled too, and even Ragged Sarah was nodding. Twenty-four ships no longer looked so large, especially when some of them were the thin, short cutters and schooners of The Word’s fleet. Cantrev had put the best of his vessels out.
Kindred looked out at the battlefield and felt a strange ambivalence. Cantrev had been the man to drive them from Arcadia, the man who would have them under his regime or have them killed.
And here were pirates, the specters of every scary story told to children growing up on Arcadia or the Mainland, some of them the very monsters who had killed Kindred’s friends, Little Wing’s friends, any number of relatives or lovers or friends of those who had crewed The Errant.
And who did she hope would win the day? To be taken back in by Cantrev, imprisoned and disempowered just as they had been here? Or to see Cantrev’s forces, probably crewed by people she had known for most of her life, sunk and dispatched?
You cannot be truly part of this place and remain a member of this crew, the captain had said.
Kindred shook her head and leaned in close to Ragged Sarah, feeling unmoored, unanchored, lost.
The Once-City fleet had flattened themselves out, forming a rough arc now, the dreadnoughts in the center, the rest of the fleet extending in either direction, arcing toward the Arcadian ships, like a sail curving with the wind, accepting and being moved by it. The pirates looked like a vessel ready to receive the Arcadian fleet.
A rough cry rose from the Once-City ships, a war shout that shook the air, echoed by the quieter, more distant cry of the sailors aboard Cantrev’s ships.
The Arcadians spilled from the thistle reef, racing forward to break through the pirate line, and Kindred could almost make out the figures on those ships now as they threaded through the trees, their hulls outfitted with metal, now scratched and dented from the Roughs.
Forward and forward and forward they came, a spear thrown at the heart of the Once-City, the center of the pirate line.
Kindred saw Ebb-La-Kem snap out an order to his flag bearers, and then two of them were up, waving one blue flag each.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It began with the trees.
Shadows fell through the air.
As Cantrev’s fleet wormed through the trees, people began dropping from the branches, three or four per tree, leaping from where they had hidden among the foliage.
For a moment, they were smudges of black and green against the backdrop of sails before quickly resolving into the hurtling forms of pirates, blades in hand, dropping through the sky, plummeting into the battle from above.
Kindred had been waiting for the battle to begin, watching the shrinking distance between Cantrev’s leading ships and the dreadnoughts sitting at the caved-in center of the pirate line.
Meanwhile, there was the battle, already begun.